It is a commonplace to say that our campuses need to be “student centered.” That we need to “meet students where they are” and recognize that our students are less likely to be the white, middle-class 18–22-year-olds that for so long comprised the overwhelming majority of college and university students at predominantly white institutions. We know that today’s students are more likely to be first-generation, low income, of nontraditional college age, and have more complex personal circumstances than ever before. We have read about their housing, financial, and food instability. We know that the complexities of our current moment—post-pandemic, politically volatile, and environmentally compromised—make their lives as students more fraught than ours were when we were undergraduates.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
